The creature and the beast

2 Words Forward

The Creature

In the interest of full disclosure my notepad is slightly smaller than the one pictured.

Firstly, sorry for taking so long in updating my blog - there's this thing called life that happens to be colliding with me as I work towards getting my honours which leaves little time left for my fun projects like this. Now, to the action. As per my last post I'm involved in the collaborative project 'Ask, New Mexico'. In fact, you can read my first chapter and Talitha Kalago's wonderful second chapter now (the third chapter should be up on Sunday night Australian Eastern Standard Time). We often talk about the writing process and how we go about things. I find that keeping all of my drafts means that I can go back through them and see how my story developed. So, I thought that today I would share a little of my process, the stitches that make the creature (I'm reading Frankenstein at the moment). Here, for my embarrassment and hopefully for your interest, is my first go at the first chapter of 'Ask, New Mexico'. After reading this please go through to the Ask, New Mexico page linked above to see the finished product.

Two starts:

1) "Been awhile since the wise owl flew by. Been awhile since I seen any bird."

2) "D'you think they knew?"

"Who?"

"The birds."

"You getting soft in the head?"

Expansion of number one (I already preferred this start and, as you can see on my final copy, it's the one I stuck with.)

"Been awhile since the wise owl flew by. Been awhile since I seen any bird." Jeremiah mused to himself.

"D'you think they knew?" Agnes asked him as she pushed back an ancient flywire screen with a tray of iced tea.

"What?"

"D'you think the birds knew about Old Flo?"

"What? You think just cause she feeds the birds they shot through cause she was dyin'?"

"Well, they have smart eyes, some of those birds."

"You lucky you're good looking!"

It was part of their code to throw compliments after insults. It had saved their marriage more than once.

"Where's Lachlan?" Jeremiah continued after a sip.

"He's up at Jackson's Hill playing with the Davison boy."

"No I'm not."

Lachlan angered the rusty door's hinges as he careless threw the door aside.

"What've you been doing?"

"Marty and I were putting together a radio using his dad's old harvester as an antenna."

It's hard to know what stuck out most about Lachlan — his auburn hair and freckles made him easy to find, his correct grammar and Edinburgh accent made him, as Old Haskell would say, stick out like dog's balls on a budgie and his ingenuity had accelerated his learning to the point where, at age 12, he was in his final year of middle school. He was also the only orphan in the area, his grandparents his only remaining family.

"What ya making a radio for?" Jeremiah asked.

"Wanted to see if we could."

Jeremiah leaned back to turn on his radio. A race caller was reporting the latest odds and scratchings for the 4:20 at (?). Lachlan skulled his drink and ran towards his bike.

"Be back for dinner!" Agnes yelled to his back.

Note to self:

What's missing:

Establish a farming community - also, they're on hard times - it's a dustbowl of rotting machinery where once there were fields of crops and animals.

This note is a verbatim transcript of what I came up with in an hour and a half between classes at uni. You'll notice that despite being an editor my first draft contains some inaccuracies ('skulled', for example) and there is a question mark instead of a place name at the end because I hadn't come up with a name yet. I think the biggest developments, however, are in the character of Lachlan and the overall story arc. Lachlan is described in much greater detail here than he is in the finished work. I consciously did this because I wanted to make the final piece as mysterious as possible so I used very little description. You'll also note that I didn't like the fact that I hadn't described the town at all. I chose a failing farm town partially because of the name of the project but also because I felt that withered machinery rusting in barren fields is creepy. The arc is wonky here; I've mushed in the birds and the radio because my brief included the radio and I think birds are a great way to show strangeness. Both made it in my final but I hadn't yet linked the birds and the radio at this stage of the writing; that actually occurred when I was writing the scene where the radio comes to life and I realised that radio sounds are quite similar to bird sounds as far as adjectives go (squawk, tweet etc.). So here we have the bare-bones of the work which would become the first chapter of 'Ask, New Mexico'.

1 Word Back

The Beast

I've lost so much time to this website!

This entry also concerns my notes above. Perhaps one of you eagle-eyed readers will have noticed a difference in spelling between the notes and the finished copy. When I describe the woman who fed the birds before she died her name is 'Old Flo' in my notes and 'Old Flow' in the final. It's a small thing but I've got to admit it's really bugging me. It's the first time that I've been auto-corrected in my work and I really resent the fact that my reference to 'Flo', being a hint towards birds with 'Florence Nightingale' was changed to be associated with water, something that I didn't put anywhere else (it is, in fact, absent in the dustbowl of Ask). I'm also annoyed that I missed it on the edit. I've since turned my auto-correct off which is equally annoying as it does come in handy when you are repeatedly writing long words but I feel that I do not want to dance with that beast again (not even for a talking tea-pot, although given that I drink a lot of tea the teapot would most likely say 'Ow! This water's hot!' more than anything else).